Autonomy in Language Learning

Those are scary words to the high school language teacher. The first thing that comes to mind is when I have the students working in pairs to come up with a dialogue on topic X. As I circulate the room I discover that X is not what they are talking about at all. What they are talking about is what they did last Saturday night or what they’re going to do this Friday night. That would be somewhat okay if they were speaking in the target language. Even scarier than the word “autonomy” is hearing what they actually did Saturday night.

Healey states that in U.S. academic settings few “teachers expect to be the sole source of language learning for their students (392).” I am reminded of one of my colleagues, a German teacher, who was “warned” by a student that if he didn’t get a 4 or 5 on the German AP exam, it would be her fault. My advice to her was to inform the (young man) that outside the rarest of cases does anyone get a 4 or 5 without at least one of the following:

-Native speaker
-Native-speaking parents
-Study/Travel abroad
-Near daily contact with a native speaker
-Hours of outside the classroom study.

There must be autonomy for the student to take ownership of his/her studies. Without autonomy the student will merely regurgitate the spoonfuls of language we force feed them. If a student has the desire to learn vocabulary outside the scope of the lesson, why would we as educators want to squelch that enthusiasm?

I once had a student who did absolutely nothing in class. No matter what I said or did he was happy with his F. Then one day, he asked me “how do you tell a girl ‘you’re so hot’ in Spanish?” After a bit of a pause, I told him and he repeated it. Then I corrected his pronunciation. Then he said it again. But then came my zinger. I asked him “what are you going to say if she responds?” He said he didn’t know. So I said “how about ‘how are you’?” His reply, “yeah, yeah. How do you say that?” So I told him “¿cómo estás?” "Oh yeah, I remember that", he said. He started to carry a Spanish/English dictionary in his backpack. And nearly every day he would tell me some new word he learned (not necessarily from the current vocab). To make a long story short, he earned a solid C for the second semester.

Just to set the record straight, I would not have answered that question under many other circumstances. But that time I saw an opportunity to motivate him with what already motivated him. Did that make him an autonomous learner? I think so.

Search Engines and Site Evaluattion

Search Engines

I used the following websites for this assignment:

http://www.excite.com/
http://www.lycos.com/
http://www.wisenut.com/ .

Lycos.com gave me the best results. It didn’t have any of the same sites in its top five as excite.com and wisenut.com. However, the lycos.com results were actually “provided by ask.com.” Just for fun I searched ask.com as well. It came back with the same results as lycos.com.

The reason I didn’t like the other two as much was because they came back with too many threaded discussions that just happened to have “wikis education” in them. The lycos/ask results solidly pertained to wikis in education.

Website Evaluation

For this assignment I am evaluating http://www.ibritt.com/resources/wp_blogs.htm#blogs .
It is a compilation of links gathered by “Pink Flamingo”. The author does not give her (sexist assumption on my part;)) name or credentials. She does however give a clue on another page. But I agree with a statement she makes that she could just make up a name and most people would be happy.
So as far I’m concerned I don’t really need to know her name or credentials for what the site is. It’s a place to find links to external material. It’s a great site for other educational resources as well. She claims up to 500 hits per day.

It is organized very well. If you arrive at the site from the above link, you will want to click on the “back to home page” link. This was my favorite of all search results because it gave me several options for the subject I searched plus dozens of other topics as well.

My sincere apologies to Pink Flamingo if she is not a she. I just didn’t want to type s/he her/him throughout the assignment.:)

Individualization

This topic can cause even a veteran teacher to cringe. How do I teach the same subject/topic to 25 individuals per class times six classes for a total of 150 individuals? That’s what could be considered the absolute worst-case scenario. If you really think about, it won’t really be necessary to come up with 150 different lesson plans or even 25 different lesson plans.

Most individuals can be put into just a few groups. I know, I know. That sounds contradictory. But if we look at table 19-1 (Ngeow, 308), there are only seven learning styles – linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. Now, seven is a whole lot fewer than 150. This is something I can get my brain around.

Most of these styles can be intertwined in countless combinations in almost any language lesson. It is true that some of the styles lend themselves to “blending” more than others. For instance, musical and bodily-kinesthetic could easily be paired in a lesson where one partner sings the “head, shoulders, knees, and toes” song while their partner goes through the motions. Using a combination of two of the styles reduces the number of lesson plans the teacher must create down to three or four.

Trying to reduce it further would probably defeat the purpose of individualized instruction. I believe that individuals can learn in this group and blend method. In the real world, this may be as good as it gets. Ngeow says that:

"…it is necessary to have students work in groups in order to increase the time spent at the computer during a task. A good reason for encouraging group work at the computer is that it leads learners to use their individual learning styles to the group’s advantage."

The reality is that in a real classroom with 25+ students it would be next to impossible to come up with 25 individualized plans. A few groups is the next best thing.